Movies Are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings

by Josh Larsen

Topsy-turvy and delightfully delivered as this is, it’s also the language of reconciliation. In Psalm 85, we’re given a picture of restored relationship between God and his people. Tucked within it is this promise: “Love and faithfulness meet together; / righteousness and peace kiss each other” (Ps 85:10).

Here and elsewhere in the Bible, obedience to God is not a limiting of freedom but a flourishing of it.

In order to return us to the state of shalom for which we were created, but have since rejected, Christ has come. His work on the cross has paid the price for humankind’s continual disobedience. Christians obey, then, largely out of gratefulness for that saving, restorative act. Our prayers of obedience, like Jonah’s, are not only pathways to flourishing but also pledges of thankfulness and faith.

Star Wars, you are what you obey.

flourishing. In both that mind-control showdown with Kylo Ren and a climactic lightsaber duel with him, it isn’t until Rey closes her eyes and prayerfully steps outside of her own self that the Force fully flows through her. In following the Force, she is freed. In trying to bend the Force to his own will, Kylo Ren suffers.

Obedience doesn’t work like a rigged slot machine, though, where you put your acts of observance in and a reward comes spitting out. It is, instead, an expression of living within the reward you’ve already been freely given. In the Heidelberg Catechism, question 86 asks the same thing Ray does—“Why then should we do good works?”—and offers a four-part answer: “So that with our whole lives we may show that we are thankful to God for his benefits, so that he may be praised through us, so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits, and so that by our godly living our neighbors may be won over to Christ.”3 By following the voice, building the field, welcoming the Black Sox, and enriching the lives of others, Ray Kinsella goes four for four.

There is always an element of sacrifice to obedience. Mostly it is a “sacrifice” of the things we think we need but really just want. Occasionally it’s an actual sacrifice of genuine goodness, as the penguins do when they go without food. (The human parenting equivalent of this, at least in my experience: sleep.) The Bible may promise that such obedience leads to joyful flourishing, but it never tells us that the process will be quick. Sometimes our winters are long. When Jesus told his disciples, “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it,” he offered both an assurance and warning (Mt 16:25).

their new life is a fuzzy retort to a habitat defined by death.

“Only when obedience is joyful, when it stems from gratitude, does it result in true freedom, in the freedom of being who and what we are meant to be.”

Keaton seems to be the only one who is both enduring the storm and contemplating it.

unlikely as it may seem, we were created with the urge to contemplate, to shut out the realities of the moment—as pressing as they may feel—and attend to something larger.

Two things stand out from these biblical examples: meditative prayer is directed by the Holy Spirit, and it is focused on the nature of God as revealed in Scripture. Christian meditation, then, is a search for wisdom, not an escape from reality. Christian contemplation is an experience of God, not a burrowing into self or an attempt, as the narrator says on a yoga DVD I’ve used, to “melt into timelessness.”

In your own home, prayer awaits you in the opening of a flower, the rising of your bread dough, or the steady, imperceptible development of a child. Spend time in silence, aware of the wonder that is being unfolded in your cakes and your children, your houseplants or your garden. For this is the essence of contemplative prayer—simple awareness, allowing God to be God, without trying to put the limitations of shape or meaning around him.

I’ve been using the terms meditation and contemplation interchangeably, but there is a distinction, perhaps best described by the sixteenth-century mystic Saint John of the Cross: “The difference between these two conditions of the soul is like the difference between working, and enjoyment of the fruit of our work; between receiving a gift, and profiting by it; between the toil of travelling and the rest of our journey’s end; between the preparation of our food and the eating and enjoyment of it.”

“For the monk searches not only his own heart: he plunges deep into the heart of that world of which he remains a part although he seems to have ‘left’ it. In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.”

it is a pause inward, in order to move outward—a considering of others and a communing with God in order to better serve the world.

meditative prayer, too, does not lead to full understanding. It is no key to the universe. Even Julian of Norwich, one of the major figures in the Christian mystic tradition, acknowledged that “the more we busy ourselves to know God’s secrets, the further away from knowledge we shall be.”

“The contemplative is one who would rather not know than know,” wrote Thomas Merton, echoing Julian of Norwich’s attitude toward empirical knowledge. “Only when we are able to ‘let go’ of everything within us, all desire to see, to know, to taste and to experience the presence of God, do we truly become able to experience that presence with the overwhelming conviction and reality that revolutionize our entire inner life.”

Julian of Norwich’s most well-known encouragement, drawn from her own contemplation: “All will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well.”

Unable to stop at the edge of a lake, Buster’s convertible goes flying into the water. After a moment of consideration, he lifts the top halfway up to create a sail. As the wind catches it and carries them along, Buster puts his arm around McGuire and contemplates the view. Without too much trouble, he’s turned a car chase into a romantic gondola ride. Prayerful contemplation is a matter of shifting our perspective, of finding an unlikely way to keep our wants and needs at bay, as pressing as they might seem. We think we’re in a sinking car, but contemplation can reveal a gondola.

Margaret Silf: “We can open our hearts to it by the practice of awareness, but we cannot bring it about, any more than we can force a flower to open or an egg to hatch. And in our silent, trustful waiting, we are acknowledging that God is God, the source and the destination, the means and the end of all our prayer, whatever form it may take.”

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7).

It isn’t only that Totoro cheers up these sisters. In serenely enjoying the rain together, in planting acorns that hold the potential for new growth, and in sitting among the branches of the resulting tree to observe the stars, Totoro teaches them how to cultivate prayerful joy in their own lives. Even in the midst of the emotional upheaval their family is experiencing, they experience and express deep-seated delight. I like to think that Totoro has shared with them a secret, a key to the universe: the knowledge that all can be endured, because one day their joy will be complete.

There is a holiness to this nonsense, a sense in which it functions as prayerful joy. Christian joy, after all, is itself a response to the silly, the absurd: the good news. That God would come down to reclaim us through the sacrificial and atoning work of Jesus, rather than simply scrap it all and start over, is laughably illogical. Yet that’s what he did, in what amounts to a cosmically nonsensical gesture.

In his book Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner places the gospel story within the literary traditions of tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. Therein he describes “the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks.”

An alignment of these prayers within God’s cosmic story would look something like this: Creation: praise Fall: yearning, lament, anger Redemption: confession, reconciliation, obedience, meditation/contemplation Restoration: joy

In Anderson’s movies these instances of redemption sneak up on you, ever so faintly, as the characters experience unexpected epiphanies. I think of these as sunrise scenes, beautifully rendered fleeting moments in which a new way of living dawns on the screen. It’s worth noting that these interior discoveries are freely, mysteriously given—gifts of grace—rather than rewards the characters have earned. Redemption works for us, after all, in the same way.

There is something precious and delicate to the manner in which a new way of seeing suddenly occurs to these characters, leaving them both enlightened and bewildered. I suppose it’s a powerful thing to witness the receiving of grace.

hope a few things: that movies, at their most potent, are not diversions or products or even works of art, but prayerful gestures received by God; that we best honor movies when we allow them this potential, rather than treat them like ways to pass the time or purchases to be made or unwashed items to be dissected according to an arbitrary moral code; and that no matter what our response, God still watches them with a heart that is both righteous and merciful. As we watch films, then, let’s enter the theater as we would a sanctuary where a prayer is about to be offered. Let’s listen to the prayer carefully and graciously before we add our own words. Let’s be a congregation, not a censor board. Let’s be open to the possibility that as movie watchers, we’re privileged eavesdroppers on a dialogue between God and the creative beings he made.

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